Best of Orlando 2017 - Food & Drink

Our readers voted online for their top picks in dozens of categories, from sweet shops to car dealers, bloggers to wedding venues. We carried our snazzy "Best of ORL" sign to various winning spots for photos, then had a "blast" coloring it for the cover.

Coffee for Good Causes

Renaut and Brooke van der Riet opened Axum Coffee (Above) in Winter Garden in 2010 with a single goal: to give away the store’s profits to organizations that are doing good in the world. The first project they targeted was the impoverished town of Axum in Ethiopia. Since then, the van der Riets have expanded their mission to include everything from a local hospital’s cancer wing to agencies working to stop human trafficking in Indonesia. Of course, to make those profits, they had to create a successful shop. To do that, they focus on their coffee—which is roasted just a few blocks away in their roastery—and on their service. “It’s our people who set us apart,” says shift leader Josh Neal. “We want somebody who has the correct attitude. We can teach anybody how to brew coffee, but you can’t teach kindness.”
—Loraine O’Connell

FRENCH FRIES

Confection Perfection

Winning the community’s affection when Sweet By Holly opened in Waterford Lakes in 2008 was easy until a slew of other cupcake shops cropped up shortly after. But Regional Manager Ashton Cole says customers stayed loyal to Sweet’s unique melding of flavors, like that found in the Creamsicle Cupcake, which mixes orange and vanilla bean into buttercream frosting that sits atop yellow cake, speckled with orange zest and stuffed with marshmallow cream. Sweet owner Hollis Wilder, a former private chef for hit television shows such as Seinfeld, and champion of Food Network's Cupcake Wars (winning it with her salmon cupcake), has moved back to Los Angeles to spend more time with her middle school-aged children and dive back into personal cooking. Cole says Wilder still crafts new confection concoctions from afar, like the Peach-Tini Cupcake that debuted for Mother's Day, adding to the shop's 84 existing flavors. "As long as you have a cell phone in hand, you can connect to anyone, anywhere," he says.
—Megan Stokes